Dr Lauren Eyssen
Lauren is a staff scientist in Professor Ray Owens’ group and she will be working on different aspects of nanobody discovery, production and engineering.
She earned her PhD in biochemistry at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) focussing on the characterisation of trypanosome virulence factors and diagnostics. Her first postdoc was carried out at UKZN using phage display for trypanosome diagnostics and was followed by another postdoc in Poland at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology. There, using activity based probes, she was involved in the study of the serine proteases involved in neutropenia caused by different mutations and conditions.
Nanobodies Discovery Platform
Nanobodies are single domain antibodies derived from the unique heavy chain only immunoglobulins of camels, llamas, and alpacas.
Disease X
The World Health Organisation lists Disease X (the name for a currently unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic) as a very serious threat to human health. To prepare for Disease X, we are building a pipeline to rapidly identify, and test nanobodies, for detecting and potentially treating future viral diseases